Public opinion changes after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident to nuclear power generation as seen in continuous polls over the past 30 years

In this study, the results of surveys conducted over the past 30 years were analyzed. The surveys include continuous opinion polls conducted by seven organizations, those conducted by eight news media one year after the Fukushima Daiichi accident, and those conducted by Institute of Nuclear Safety System (INSS) 14 times from 1993 to December 2011. The results were as follows: (1) negative opinions towards nuclear power generation (NPG) suggesting ‘abolition or reduction,’ which was 20%–30% over the past 30 years, increased to 70% from four to six months after the accident, when there was also much news about renewable energy. (2) Even after the accident, 60% regarded NPG as ‘inevitable,’ but many opposed future replacement or new construction of NPG facilities. (3) After the accident, recognition of the usefulness of NPG and concerns about electric power shortages in the near future remained unchanged, while anxiety and distrust toward NPG increased significantly. When considering power generation options, people now tend to focus on accident risks. (4) Nevertheless, people are neither aware of various possible problems caused by reducing NPG nor willing to accept a significant rise of electricity rates caused by the shift to renewable energy.     

Cellular origin of dysiherbaine, an excitatory amino acid derived from a marine sponge

The cellular origin of dysiherbaine, a marine-sponge toxin, was investigated immunohistochemically by using an anti-dysiherbaine antibody. Dysiherbaine-like immunoreactivity was found to be localized in spherical cells harbored in the sponge mesohyl. A combination of ribosomal RNA gene (rDNA) analysis and cell-morphology analysis revealed that the spherical cells were Synechocystis cyanobacteria. However, the sponge, identified as Lendenfeldia chondrodes on the basis of its rDNA sequence, appeared to contain two different chemotypes--dysiherbaine-producing (DH+) and nondysiherbaine-producing (DH-)--both of which inhabited the same region. Synechocystis cells in the DH- sponge were not labeled with antibody, although the 16S rDNA gene profile of the cyanobacteria in the DH- sponge was indistinguishable from that of the cyanobacteria in the DH+ sponge. On the basis of these results, we hypothesize that dysiherbaine is a metabolite of certain varieties of endosymbiotic Synechocystis sp.     

SupAUTH: A new approach to supply chain authentication for the IoT

Recent advances of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have enhanced the use of radio‐frequency identification‐based tracking system to be widely deployed in supply chain management covering every step involved in the flow of merchandise from the supplier to the customer to ensure a trustworthy delivery environment. Such authentication system (also known as path authentication) not only guarantees the merchandise to be available in the right destination with no discrepancies and errors but also ensures the route of the merchandise progress to be valid. This paper outlines the current state‐of‐the‐art cryptographic solutions for path authentication, highlights their properties and weakness, and proposes a novel, privacy‐preserving, and efficient solution. Compared with the existing elliptic curve ElGamal re‐encryption–based solution, our homomorphic message authentication code on arithmetic circuit–based solution offers less memory storage (with limited scalability) and no computational requirement on the reader. Moreover, we allow computational ability inside the tag that articulates a new privacy direction to the state‐of‐the‐art path privacy. This privacy notion helps support the confidentiality of the tag movement in the context of IoT‐enabled cross‐organizational tracking environment where the stakeholders can be from different organizations associated together with the merchandise being delivered. As a potential extension to the path authentication protocol, we further propose a polynomial‐based mutual authentication as a security extension and batch initialization as an efficiency extension. Besides our brief security and privacy analysis, our evaluation shows that the proposed solution can significantly reduce memory requirements on tags with marginal computational overhead to ensure transmission path confidentiality. We observe that SupAUTH requires maximum 513‐bit tag memory and 57.3 ms of processing time during evaluation, which is not only practical but also suitable for any suitable low‐cost radio‐frequency identification deployment in IoT.     

Influence of surface roughness created by admixing smaller particles on improving discharge particle flowability of main particles

Particle flowability can be improved by admixing with particles smaller than the main particles. However, the mechanism by which this technique improves flowability is not yet fully understood. In this study, we focused on vibrating discharge particle flowability as one type of flowability and investigated the influence of the main particle roughness created by the adhesion of the admixed particles on improving the flowability. The diameters of the main and admixed particles (MPs and APs) were 41.4 or 60.8?μm and 8 or 104?nm, respectively. The main and admixed particles were mixed in various mass ratios, and the discharge particle flow rates of the mixed particles were measured. Scanning electron microscopy images were acquired from two different angles to determine the three-dimensional surface roughness using image analysis software. We then calculated the coating structure parameters from the obtained three-dimensional surface roughness. The observed trends for improving the vibrating discharge particle flowability were found to differ from those reported for compression particle flowability. Furthermore, the main particle roughness conditions that led to the greatest improvement involved the presence of several admixed particle agglomerations between the main particles.     

1H-NMR studies on water in methacrylate hydrogels. II

Properties of water in the wet membranes of a random copolymer of methyl methacrylate and methoxy poly(ethylene glycol)–monomethacrylate P(MMA-co-M100G) and of a graft copolymer of vinyl chloride and methoxy poly(ethylene glycol)–monomethacrylate P(VC-g-M100G) membranes were studied by proton NMR spectroscopy. Both polymers contain flexible polyoxyethylene side chains. Temperature and frequency dependences of relaxation times, changes of signal intensity of water protons on freezing and thawing, and saturation transfer were measured for both copolymers. These experimental results revealed that most of the bound water in these copolymers does not exist in a rigid state as suggested for the other hydrogels. The introduction of flexible hydrophilic side chains resulted in high mobility of the water molecules bound to the side chains (the apparent correlation time T_c ～ 10^?10 s). For the graft copolymer P(VC-g-M100G), hydrophilic polyoxyethylene side chains are contiguous to each other. Because of the interaction between the side chains, the mobility became more complex than that for the random copolymer P(MMA-co-M100G). The difference in the mode of mobility of water on the membrane surface may be related to the difference of the membrane characteristics of these copolymers.     

Cutting the energy bills of Internet Service Providers and telecoms through power management: An impact analysis

The energy consumption of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector has been increasing recently; this sector is estimated to account for 2% of the total energy consumption. An even more aggressively increasing trend is the volume of Internet traffic and the number of connected devices. Thus, reducing the energy needs of the Internet is recognised as one of the main challenges that the ICT sector will have to face in the near future to reduce its overall energy footprint. Introducing energy-efficient techniques, both at the device level and the network level, is required.The main goal of this work is to quantitatively evaluate the potential energy savings from applying energy-efficient techniques, while examining the trade-off between network performance and the achieved energy savings.We introduce a categorisation of the energy-aware design space, focusing on the existing techniques in the device data plane, and contribute an analytical framework to represent the impact of energy-aware technologies and solutions for network devices. Our energy profile model represents the diverse energy-aware states of the network devices and is applied over two reference scenarios, one of a large-scale Telco (Telecom Italia) and one of a medium size Internet Service Provider (GRNET), to evaluate the impact of each energy-aware technology and the energy savings potential at the Home, Access, Metro/Transport and Core parts of each network.The results show the estimates of energy savings exceed 60% in many cases, while maintaining the same quality of service as in the energy-agnostic case.     

Analysis of water layers and the extent of gelatinization for commercial starch products

Water sorption characteristics were investigated using both the GAB and Smith models for commercial starch products to determine their involvement in the extent of gelatinization. The GAB monolayer water content, W_m, correlated well with the Smith parameter w_b, whereas the R² coefficient of W_m with the Smith parameter w′ exhibited a weaker correlation. The relationship between W_m and the multilayer water content, MC, could be expressed with R² coefficients greater than 0.840 and the ratio of W_m to MC was constant at 1:2–1:3, irrespective of variations in ingredients and sorption processes. Thus, the coverage of particular water binding sites is considered to be simple, despite the various components of commercial starch products. In addition, both W_m and MC may be involved in the extent of gelatinization: swelling capacity and viscosity were intimately involved in the early stage of gelatinization.     

Relationship between monolayer and multilayer water contents,and involvement in gelatinization of baked starch products

Water sorption was investigated using a gravimetric technique to determine the involvement of water in gelatinization for baked starch products. The water isotherm could be described well using both the GAB and the Smith equations. Baked products with higher GAB monolayer water content (M₀C) could be made from dough with higher water content. In addition, M₀C was found to be correlated with both the Smith parameters w_b and w′, whereas the multilayer water content (MC) was reflected more in w′ than w_b. Although the desorption process maintains more water than adsorption, the ratio of M₀C to MC was constant irrespective of sorption process. Both M₀C and MC showed good correlations with the gelatinization parameters, but the correlations were weaker in the case of adsorption. Therefore, gelatinization may reflect water desorption characteristics, suggesting that hydration is incomplete in the adsorption process and new binding sites of water would be involved to a greater extent in gelatinization.